


That One in Which Chairman Rose is Actually Not a Pedophile

by sinnerrific



Category: Pocket Monsters: Sword & Shield | Pokemon Sword & Shield Versions
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark, Dehumanization, Dubious Consent, Favoritism, Funny Title Awful Story, Implied/Referenced Incest, M/M, Pre-Slash, Rape/Non-con Elements, eat the damn dove
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-23
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:27:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22377940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinnerrific/pseuds/sinnerrific
Summary: “…But Is Still a Horrible, Self-Centered Narcissist and an Enabler.”OR:Leehop, AU. An unfortunate accident ends Leon’s first attempt at the Gym Challenge early. But in due time, he recovers. He wins the title of Champion with flair and style at the still-tender age of thirteen. And when the newly crowned young Champion, so heartily endorsed by the chairman of Macro Cosmos, is all too happy to do all the duties required of Galar’s Champion and to have achampiontime while doing them…that Leon has one, firm insistence in return that he demands fulfilled, is simply the least Chairman Rose can do.And that would to have his baby brother, Hop, relocated to Leon’s custody in Wyndon. Permanently.It is a strange request to make, to be sure. Unfortunately for everyone—including himself—Rose obliges.
Relationships: Dande | Leon/Hop
Comments: 10
Kudos: 52





	That One in Which Chairman Rose is Actually Not a Pedophile

**Author's Note:**

> i'm sorry hop. you don't get to be happy in any universe
> 
> i'm sorrier readers, that this is leehop from Rose's POV here?? for like this absolute pre-awfulness or whatever it is I just wrote on a whim one day and then finally finished up just now, i don't know. if I ever do more with this, it won't be Rose POV the way through, probably. also please somebody remind me at some point to CHANGE the stupid TITLE, jesus fuck

* * *

When the talented young man Rose sponsored first at 10 years old and who finally won the Gym Challenge in his thirteenth year made the odd, personal request near the beginning of his first year as Galar’s official Champion—Rose assumed Leon had only the best of intentions.

What other reason could there be? Maybe something was wrong at the young man’s home. Maybe his younger brother brother had a relationship to him closer to that of a friend, or Leon wanted the boy to have opportunities in Wyndon he wouldn’t have in a tiny place such as Leon’s home of Postwick.

Rose wouldn’t know. He’d never had siblings of his own and had been courageous when it counted to pave his own way through life from an age not much older than young Leon himself was now. Rose agreed to Leon’s…request, phrased more like a demand, and Rose took the opportunity to start broaching the subject of the energy crisis while he had the moment of favors (and leverage) on hand only for Leon to stop him midsentence and say it didn’t matter, that his brother was the only thing he wanted.

And so long as Leon had as much time as he desired with his brother outside of work, he’d do anything else Rose wanted, no questions asked. Except for—

(And at this point he began to list some very specific and unmentionable things, to the point that Rose had to frantically halt the boy from completing all the vulgarities he apparently wasn’t willing to commit to because _honestly_ , did Leon truly think that of him?)

Rose was appalled by the unexpected turn in their exchange, more so that Leon had thrown out such…accusatory and vile suggestions as if Rose were apparently liable to ask them of him.

For goodness’ _sake_ , Leon was a boy. A teenager, if barely; still a boy. The chairman had no intentions toward him whatsoever.

That was not to say it wasn’t easy to imagine—at least, it _had_ been, before that little display and before that feeling of something just _off_ began to tug at Rose’s instincts near his sponsored new Champion—to imagine that in the future, perhaps, Leon might grow into someone handsome and princelike. A man of the sort that Rose’s temperament was liable to dream about…

But that would be one day. Hardly close to now. And frankly the chairman held no interest toward anyone too small to sweep him off his feet, and equally if not less so, toward a man (or, if it even need be said, once more, a _boy_ ) that could list off such disgusting proclivities so casually.

Rose told himself that teenagers must pick up this sort of language from each other, it was no more than that. He told himself a part of Leon had always been a little…too proud, too brash, that being flip was to be expected of an adolescent and with some more…education in the delicacies of wealth and prominence he might be persuaded to realize it was uncouth to say such things aloud in his position even to someone he was close to as the chairman.

Rose didn’t miss that Leon never used such language in public, as if he already knew the difference.

And, even that aside. Something about this just didn’t sit right.

But there was Galar to think about. Leon had agreed without even wanting to hear the full details, that he would do whatever else Rose asked when it came to Eternatus when the time came. When he was old enough to be the hero Galar was ready to rally behind, when he was the people’s Champion and not only the Pokémon League’s.

And that was what the chairman needed to hear.

Rose agreed to the very odd request from his young beneficiary and simply told himself that in the worst-case scenario, if Leon wasn’t able to handle the responsibility of his little brother on his own, Macro Cosmos doubtless had room in its budget for a nanny even if young Leon seemed affronted by the idea.

—

Rose wasn’t familiar nor comfortable with children, truth be told. Leon had been an interest of the chairman’s by coincidence, as a very young trainer, for his obvious potential to be great. And that remained unchanged now that Leon had seen it through to the end of Rose’s goals for him (for now).

However, it seemed Leon _was_ familiar with children, this one child at least. And supposedly, he’d take care of everything with regards to his brother, and wouldn’t let it take away form his duties as Champion. Leon said this confidently, and in a way that sounded less like a promise than a warning.

Hop, his brother’s name was? Rose wondered, boarding the taxi for Postwick and allowing Oleana to mark its location on a regional map for the taxi driver. She didn’t seem bothered by any of what Leon had requested after Rose agreed to the terms, and the chairman tried to put the matter out of his head for the duration of the ride.

At least the parts of it that were bothering him quite so much.

—

Rose found himself not nervous, exactly, but also not certain what to expect when he arrived at the house instructed with an envelope pressed neatly in one hand. At his side Oleana knocked at the door and Rose wondered once again why Leon had surprised him after the nature of his request by following it with a clarification that he was not coming with them.

Rose had no idea what reaction he might get from Leon’s family. He’d never met them but in passing at train stations, and Leon never gave any indication that he missed them very much up until now.

Or, that he missed his brother. Certainly he must have more than his mother, or his grandparents. That probably wasn’t the reason Leon had only requested Hop move out to be with him in Wyndon, Rose reassured himself. Leon was a shrewd child with good instincts, if terrible with directions. If he wanted Hop to come and live with him leaving their other relatives at the house where both boys grew up, it was probably something the family understood better than Rose would.

That they indeed understood did not to turn out be a comfort.

Oleana explained to Leon’s mother what Leon had decided (not _requested_ , she did not have to specify, because Leon was decisive as a Champion should be and if Rose endorsed his decisions then they were as good as made). Rose noticed the child, Hop, clinging curiously at the doorway to the family’s kitchen where Rose could see him. The chairman attempted a smile or something close enough to one in the boy’s direction; and little Hop startled, clearly surprised to have been noticed. He ducked back and disappeared from sight, except for the telltale, child-size shadow still visible there just outside the door.

The sight might have made Rose smile genuinely, had he not chosen then to look back at Leon’s mother as Oleana had finished crisply stating in no uncertain terms Leon messages passed along for them, chiefly the insistence that Hop would be returning with herself and the chairman. Rose knew he ought to be telling this part, but he gave Oleana a nod to continue on, and she was unhesitant to do so.

He told himself he was smiling at the boys’ mother instead of speaking as a calming presense and told himself he wasn’t unnerved, as his assistant clarified in more specific terms the way Leon had also taken it upon himself to make sure the remainder of his family was…comfortable, here in Postwick. Any living expenses they needed or wanted to budget for luxuries were to be gifted them directly by their elder son, from his savings as a trainer and his salary.

Oleana spoke as if the two points of conversation, Hop and financial provisions for the remainder of their family, were not related. Rose tried to tell himself that was because it was true, and exactly the case.

Rose should have given more thought, serious thought, to his early reservations when he saw how Leon’s mother took the news.

It was impossible—whatever he tried to tell himself later—not to see the despairing resignation in the boys’ mother’s eyes when she listened to the end of Oleana’s crisp speech, as if this was something she’d expected for a long time and didn’t want.

Uncomfortably, Rose waited for the woman to reply, affirmative or otherwise, preparing lists of reasons already in his mind that could be persuasive.

Instead the woman turned to the doorway. The one where her younger son still waited in hiding.

“Hop,” she called out, voice cracking on the name, after a long moment of silence. The boy’s mother still did not say a word to either Rose or Oleana.

Anxiously little Hop shuffled in. He looked up at his mother and the pair of strangers with wide eyes.

His mum sighed. “Please go…go to your room and pack some things,” she said, distracted, the wording vague, but startling Rose all the same in that it was that simple. Her decision already made and acceptance given.

Hop gave a confused look to the three adults. His mother spoke again, a sharper edge to her voice:

“Don’t dally, Hop! You’re going to visit your big brother in Wyndon for a spell, that’s all. Get on, hurry and pack your clothes up and whatever else you need to take.”

Hop seemed delighted at this, lighting up immediately. He was practically radiant from the moment his mum said “brother.” The child’s face, now split into a wide grin as he cheered, was ecstatic as he bounded out of the room.

That part was a relief. But there was a bigger problem.

Rose frowned and Oleana’s mouth thinned into a hard line.

Perhaps the woman had misunderstood their meaning, but a mere visit from his younger brother was not what Leon had intended.

“I’m afraid you perhaps don’t quite realize our meaning,” Rose heard himself saying smoothly with a placating smile. “That is—your son was _very_ clear that this arrangement was nothing so temporary as—”

“How much.”

Rose blinked, cut off at the words and unsure what to say.

Leon’s mother looked up at him, blinking back tears.

“I—I beg pardon?” Rose asked, only to be cut off by the mother, rambling, wiping away tears of bitterness.

“Oh, he’ll get what he wants in the end. Our Leon always has,” she said, her voice compressed and tight and bizarrely _disappointed_. “And Hop, he’s nothing special, but still, Leon. Leon always…”

She trailed off, looking off to the side facing a window into the family’s picturesque front yard. Rose had to stop himself from staring. The raw admission of favoritism between her sons was appalling, even with what Leon had accomplished at the tender age of thirteen.

Her words taken together with the woman’s tears and the way she seemed so resigned, so clearly unhappy to be—losing? her second son this way, yet not even attempting to refuse…

Rose was baffled, utterly, and he was uncomfortable in the extreme. It was clear to him that, whether she valued her second son by his own merits or not, the boy’s mother did love him on some level.

But Rose and Oleana’s arrival to spirit the young one (Hop, he thought, Rose would have to make an effort to remember his name in the long term for Leon’s sake) to Wyndon at his brother’s behest seemed like a possibility she’d been prepared for, possibly even waiting for.

And she was afraid for her son.

But _which_ son?

It would have been a valid concern for her to worry that Leon was too young by far to care for a boy as young as Hop like a parent. With or without the help of Macro Cosmos and its resources at his disposal.

And yet, Rose had a sinking feeling this was not what why the woman was talking of her eldest the way she had.

As if Leon were—

No, Rose thought faintly, he was overthinking this. It was all a fanciful turn of imagination gone far too dark for whatever the real explanation was.

Whatever it was.

But as he waited, the woman did not try to clarify her words in the slightest. She made no arguments in defense of keeping Hop at his family’s home, and not with Leon.

The woman wiped her eyes with a napkin, gave the pair of them a watery glare.

“Well, then?” she asked, voice shaking still with tears, and now also, anger.

Rose swallowed. He didn’t know what she was asking. “I’m afraid that I—”

“I suppose if I don’t send Hop along now, Leon will just come to get him himself. I’ve half a mind to make him; I feel that boy sometimes forgets he has a family that he might think to visit every once in a blue moon.” Again, the same trace of bitterness, the same words that sounded like puzzle pieces for how little they made sense even in their context. What the two boys had to do with each other that could make all this tone and attitude now make sense.

Rose and Oleana exchanged uncertain glances. Leon’s mother wiped her eyes again and glared at Rose, then Oleana.

“Well?” she repeated finally, placing her hands on her hips with determined composure. “You said Leon would pay for us to be comfortable. Which is a little insulting, frankly—it’s not as if we’d jeopardize all that Leon’s worked for and say a word to anyone that may ask. Even if that boy clearly has no qualms about what might happen to his reputation when the truth comes out.”

She gave a hollow laugh. Oleana’s expression flattened, impatient, but Rose felt dread crawling in him even though he had absolutely no idea what Leon’s mother meant by any of what she had just said.

Leon hadn’t done anything wrong.

…Had he?

“If he truly thinks he can afford to accept the consequences of his actions—that he won’t get caught risking everything on that—” she huffed, seeming insulted by the very idea, and Rose hoped very much that she had not been about to end her sentence with the unsaid but very heard _brother of his_. “Well, then, he can afford for the _rest_ of his family who still cares about him, to live in comfort. S-So. Let’s negotiate, and at least we’ll still have…”

Her voice went quiet, suddenly, almost dreamlike, and she lowered her hands to her sides and stared back out the window.

“Yes. A lovely, big, empty house, without any children in it. Now that Leon’s gone and decided that he and Hop don’t need a mother anymore…”

Rose felt himself growing more uncomfortable the longer she spoke. This was insane.

He half-hoped this _woman_ was insane, and that was the end of it.

Finally Oleana interrupted stiffly, with a very blunt financial estimate of what Macro Cosmos had guessed their family needed for the lifestyle the Champion wished for them to have.

Leon’s mother snapped out of her trance, and nodded, and the two women began to talk.

Oleana and the boys’ mother began negotiating the amount that the family was to receive, after Hop was relocated comfortably. Rose was half-listening and unsurprised, for once, on this little trip of theirs, to hear the two women trading numbers in the sixes of digits.

Rose was quite ready to leave the impersonal, cold conversation behind. He half-wished he’d simply sent another employee to do what he’d considered a task delicate enough that the chairman himself could handle it. He thought he understood now, perhaps, why Leon might not have wished to return here with them, even to see his brother sooner.

Rose clung a bit desperately to the hope, that timbre of the conversation they’d all just survived fully explained why Leon wanted Hop with him, and out of the family’s home as well.

Speaking of whom.

Before long, the boy, Leon’s brother, emerged again from the hallway with a sloppily zipped suitcase full of unfolded clothes, a small Wooloo trailing at his side. It was obvious he was too young to have been able to pack up himself, would hardly know what was needed even if this were only a short trip. Yet his mother made no comment and Rose found himself and Oleana following her lead, if doubtless each for different reasons.

They could afford any clothes and necessities for the boy once back in Wyndon. You could replace anything with enough funding.

Rose had absolutely no desire to stay here any longer, and Oleana probably felt the same, if she even cared to know what the boy may or may not have inadvertently taken or left behind, so long as Leon’s request was fulfilled per the chairman’s instructions.

“Mum?” Hop tried to hold up his bag for her to show he was ready, glanced at his mother with wide eyes when he realized the two unfamiliar grown-ups were staring at him with intent. He shrunk back a bit, intimidated.

The young boy’s mother would not look at him. Her voice was curt.

“Hop, this is Mr. Rose. You’re going with him now, to see your brother.”

Hop glanced at the unfamiliar adults and then back at her, nervous.

He then visibly deflated. “Y…You’re not coming?” he said to his mum, looking suddenly far more anxious than excited.

“Don’t—” the child’s mother swallowed, fought for composure. “ _Don’t_ start with me, Hop. Just…get in the taxi like Mr. Rose and his partner say, and you’ll see Leon soon.”

Hop stared at her miserably, sufficiently cowed from arguing at being scolded even though he looked quite frightened and lost when Oleana beckoned him forward and Rose uncomfortably offered the boy a smile.

Finally, when it became apparent that Hop was going to do no more than stare, and Rose left uncertain of how to proceed, Hop’s mother walked over to him.

Rose watched, nonplussed, as she knelt to the six-year-old’s own height. She tilted his chin up to look at her, seemed to be absorbing every detail of Hop’s small face.

She rested her other hand on his shoulder, expression grave.

“Hop, dear. When you get to Wyndon, promise me you’ll do whatever Leon tells you. No exceptions,” she said softly, and the hairs on Rose’s neck stood on end for reasons he couldn’t explain.

“Mum?”

“No matter what it is Leon tells you while you’re there, you mind him. No whining and no fussing, either—I don’t care what it is, Hop,” she said, voice urgent, trying to impart something desperate, afraid.

And Rose felt as if he were intruding on something intimate; inappropriate, even.

“If Leon says for you to do something, for god’s sake, just do what he wants. Your brother…h-he knows what’s best for you. To have a nice time with him, instead of a bad one.” She swallowed, staring at her younger son with wide eyes. “Can you promise me, Hop?”

Rose’s stomach twisted as he watched young Hop watched her face, confused.

“…Yes? Mum…”

“Good.” As quickly as the moment of bewildering fear and tenderness came, it was gone. She did not so much as give her son a hug or kiss good-bye: Hop’s mother merely stood up brusquely and walked to the back of the kitchen, leaning in the door frame of the hallway.

When Hop made to follow her on instinct, his mother scowled and pointed a finger warningly toward the other two adults now waiting at the front door of the house.

Rose was desperate to be gone from this…whatever on earth it was that he was seeing. Good Lord.

“You go on, Hop. Tell Leon we miss him, and you behave yourself around anyone from the Pokémon League if you meet them. Just…” she bit her lip, and looked away, ignoring the clear hurt and anxiety on Hop’s face, as Oleana gripped his hand and forcefully pulled him so one of his feet was out the door, the other inside and hesitating.

“B-Be a good boy, Hop,” his mother finished lamely. “Remember, Leon’s your brother, and what he says, goes. I don’t want to hear about you doing _anything_ that would ruin your brother’s good name, do I—d-do I make myself clear?”

Hop looked utterly bewildered, barely comprehending a word of this. He didn’t have time to ask, even, as Oleana briskly angled his arm and pushed so he had no choice but to move or else feel the pressure on his joints, stumbling from the door to the front yard where the large black Corviknight taxi waited.

Hop stole a glance back toward the house, shaking with his Wooloo lifted in his arms while an attendant grabbed his bag and placed it in the cab. The boy’s lip trembled, looking for his mother’s visage at the front door he’d walked out of, but she wasn’t there.

It was too much. Rose couldn’t make heads or tails of this and he only grew more unsettled every breathing moment they were here. He was ready to be back in Wyndon and for all of this to be some bizarre, strange event that would end in a seamless transition to normalcy once they were away from this tiny, empty town full of tiny, empty people.

So decided, and before he could convince himself otherwise, Rose picked up the boy while Hop was distracted and placed him in the back of the cab alongside his Wooloo. The chairman could hardly believe himself even as he was clumsily buckling Hop in to the seat with his own hands, felt like a middle-class parent in a commercial in a way that made his own skin crawl. He withdrew from the cab as soon as he was done, as if the contact burned.

Hop startled and tried to undo the seat belt, but he didn’t have the dexterity in his small hands or clear enough head to get himself free, though he looked ready to jump out of the car if he were so able.

Rose couldn’t look at the boy in his distress, had to turn away. Though his periphery vision informed him what he tried not to see.

Panicked, Hop clung to his Wooloo and stared wide-eyed out the taxi door and toward the now-closed front door of his house—what had _been_ his house, until minutes ago, until two unfamiliar adults just waltzed in to relocate him from his existing life permanently.

Now, it was a place he may never see again, Rose thought uncomfortably, though he attempted to remind himself that of course Leon and Hop would be at leisure to visit. He was being ridiculous.

The child’s eyes were searching for his mother in that doorway. Searching for some last familiarity, some reassurance.

A smile? A wave goodbye?

Rose wouldn’t find out. The door stayed closed. Leon and little Hop’s mum did not emerge from it.

The cab doors shut without fanfare, closing Hop in, and Rose and Oleana climbed into the front of the cabin. The latter nodded to the driver.

Rose’s assistant, at least, could be counted on to remain as composed as ever in the face of what felt uncomfortably like…kidnapping. Which—

You usually _hired_ people for things like that, the chairman thought, exasperated, not liking the idea of having his own hands so grotesquely unclean with something like that, even if it was only a misunderstanding.

“Wyndon, please.” Oleana’s voice was crisp and unbothered, as usual.

The cab began to rise, up, up, higher…

Hop let out a whimper. The adults in the car ignored the sound. Rose closed his eyes, trying not to hear him.

Young Hop’s sniffles and muffled little cries of anxiety and fear went on, and went ignored, too, for the few minutes they lasted. Until he finally went quiet, miserable. Letting out the occasional sob every now and again, while the Corviknight flew them across the region from tiny Postwick.

None of the adults in the taxi had anything of comfort they could say.

Even if they had wanted to.

Rose told himself that this was just one uncomfortable instance, and a bad coincidental one, at that. He was certain things would be fine once the child got to Wyndon, and Leon was able to explain things to him properly.

Somehow.

Whatever explanation there ultimately was, or could be, for…

For why the head of Macro Cosmos and his assistant had just taken a six-year-old from his mother and left an enormous sum of promissory funds in his place, on the whims of a thirteen-year-old Pokémon Champion.

Rose hoped fervently a fleeing moment that if nothing else, he wished Leon could at least hold the damned title as long as the chairman needed him to. That he could deliver on the chairman’s dream that would make this, or any other necessary sacrifices at others’ expense, well worth it.

—

And in the end—the chairman got that much, at least.

**Author's Note:**

> look i don't even know if i WANT to continue this, it'd be heading into like, triple danger shota brocon territory yea but mostly bc i have another fic I'm working on and the entire thing of this one was just…the idea in the title being honestly kinda funny to me when it's usually rose depicted as the world's most obvious predator candidate & i love the idea of him being actually pretty offended by the idea and not into that, no sir, he wants a big strong man
> 
> but of course he's still morally bankrupt enough to handwave it if it'll get him that sweet sweet dynamax energy for forever
> 
> …
> 
> the story is less funny obviously. thankfully, it's just a story. 
> 
> @sinnerrific on twitter if you want to give a shout! …tho, I mostly just creep on other authors from here bc I'm shy and tired always ｡(*^▽^*)ゞ


End file.
